LIVE theatre remains on a knife-edge. The good news is that the National Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Bath, are among those that are re-opening: less happily, thousands of workers have been laid off and fear of a second lockdown remains. This month, although welcoming a few green shoots, I thought I’d look back at the past and pay tribute to three great artists who all died in the course of a week in September.
One of the quirks of modern life is that, when a famous actor dies, he or she is identified by the TV roles they have played. Thus it was with Diana Rigg, who was inevitably tagged as Emma Peel from The Avengers and Lady Olenna Tyrell from Game of Thrones.
There was, however, infinitely more to Dame Diana than that. She was a superb theatre actress, latterly in classical tragedy, but initially in comedy. I would pick out three parts from the 1970s: Dotty in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers in 1972, where she was the epitome of stylish glamour, descending from the heavens seated aboard a crescent moon; the ultra-feminine Celimene in Tony Harrison’s rhyming update of Molière’s The Misanthrope; and Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion. In these last two, she played opposite Alec McCowen and they proved perfect comic partners: both had a relish for language and for a contest of wit and emotion.
Esta historia es de la edición October 14, 2020 de Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
